Home Solar Power News

Home Solar Power News

by Deb Powers

A few weeks ago, I talked about the green pushback and the preference for home solar over huge solar power installations in the deserts. There's been a widespread belief that the best way to generate power is through centralized installations that then distribute that power over large spaces.

A corollary of that is the belief that solar power would never attract the kind of investment money and attention needed for wide adoption until we found a way to make it easy and profitable for big companies to sink their money into building huge solar power plants so that they could sell the energy produced to residential and business customers. That is, after all, the model with which we're all familiar. It works for hydroelectric power generated by dams. It works for coal-fired power plants. It works for nuclear energy plants. And it could, of course, work for solar powered energy plants. But is it really the best way to produce and use solar energy?

It may or may not be. Building large, central solar power generation plants is certainly likely to be profitable for utility companies for many reasons.  

• Installation costs for centralized solar plants would be lower and more controllable. Imagine the difference between building at a single location vs the costs of installing photovoltaic panels on millions of private homes and residences. Building bigger in a central location means easier cost control and easier quality control.
• Maintenance costs would be cheaper over time as well. The same logic applies - it's far easier to establish and maintain on-site maintenance crews to deal with cleaning the solar mirrors or panels and making repairs when necessary than it would be to count on homeowners scattered over a large area to maintain their personal or local installations.
• Centralized solar power generating plants would be wholly owned by the utility company. That's a big one. The utility company selling the electricity would wholly own the solar generating equipment and the property on which it stands. That cuts out a lot of bureaucracy and rules that cover payment of subsidies and tariffs and fees.
• The owner of the installation could control the flow of power. Centralized power generation means that it's easier to control and restrict the flow of power leaving the installation. It's easier to manage that way, and easier to regulate for an uninterrupted flow of power to all users.

There are also some disadvantages to centralized solar power generation.

• The flow of energy depends on building and maintaining distribution lines. A solar power generation plant in the middle of the desert is useless without a grid to transmit the energy and distribute it to customers. Rebuilding our power grids is only part of the issue. We also need to build all new transmission lines from the installations to reach the existing grid - and upgrade that grid to deal with the variable output of a solar installation.
• Centralized grids are easier to disrupt. The security of our national and local grids are of major importance. Most of us rely so heavily on electricty for our daily needs that a major power outage could seriously disrupt not only our lives, but the security of our country. When power generation for large parts of the population is centralized in one location, any disruption in that central source could have widespread devastating effects.
• There is growing concern about the dangers of large solar power installations on the surrounding areas. Just this week, BrightSource Energy, a major investor in the Southwest US energy market, announced that it was scrapping its plans to build a solar generation plant in the middle of a national conservation area in the Mojave Desert. Environmentalists had raised concerns about the disruption to local wildlife and ecology if a massive power plant were to be built in the proposed area. Environmentalists have also expressed concern about the heat generated by huge concentrations of solar mirrors in the desert.

By contrast, there are a number of advantages to having distributed solar generation - solar panels on the tops of residential and other privately owned structures.

• Distributed solar offers higher security and lower chance of widespread disruption. Logically, it's much harder to knock out energy to a large segment of the power grid when the power is being generated by millions of individual installations throughout a large area. It's also easier to catch malfunctions earlier, since people would notice a breakdown in energy generation that affected their home.
• Wide distribution of solar panels is less harmful to the environment. Photovoltaic panels spread across the roofs of an entire city would, in theory, not cause the same disruption to the environment that a single huge plant would. In addition, solar photovoltaic panels absorb the light energy from the sun rather than reflecting it back into the air. The danger of superheated air is far lower than it is with most types of stored solar energy.

Of course, the biggest drawback to distributed solar power generation is the initial cost of installation to individuals. Most people can't afford the thousands of dollars in up front costs to build solar panels on their roofs. Even with subsidies, the cost is prohibitive to many home and business owners. And until recently, home solar installations essentially took money out of the pockets of utility companies because people who generate their own electricity aren't buying it from the utility company. In addition, many of them pay for excess solar power generated by home solar panels.

Legislators in Arizona have taken a step toward allowing and encouraging utility companies to get involved in residential and business solar installations. Last week, they passed a measure allowing utility companies to collect tax credits on solar panels they install on properties that they do not own. This opens the field for utility companies and other investors to pay installation costs for residential and other private solar installations and keep ownership of them.

Once all the kinks are worked out, it could work like this. You contact the electric company and invite them to place solar panels on your roof. The utility pays the cost of installation and maintenance, but maintains ownership of the panels and equipment. The panels generate electricity for your home, and any extra is fed back into the grid, increasing the availability of electric power for others. Since the utility company foots the installation costs and the maintenance costs, they get the tax credits and advantages that would go to homeowners who pay to install and maintain solar panels on their roofs.

The model is one that bears looking at in other parts of the country that receive a fair amount of sunshine throughout the year. It removes the upfront cost of solar installation from the shoulders of individuals, and rewards utility companies for investing in home and individual generation of power while increasing the security of the power grid in the communities where it is used.

Photo credit: stock.xchang/jbolhuis

Comments

[Larry]

The utility owned distributed electrical energy generation is a great idea except that, the electrical utilities are in it for the money, especially since our genius government "de-regualted" and privatized our electrical grid distribution component . Since photovoltaic energy is a dead loss financially, and possibly on an ecological basis, also, at the moment, this is isn't going to happen in the near future.

OTOH: A company in USA is selling select PV panels for $1.98 per watt of panel. This marks (hopefully) the end of an era where the buyer gets ripped off on PV equipment.